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Hearthstone NA: January 2016 Ranked Play and HWC Point Standings

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Blizzard have released the final standings from Ranked Play Season 22 for the Americas region. They have also updated their standings page for Hearthstone World Championship (HWC) points. These are believed to be the final standings for the Winter season. At the top of both lists is fr0zen of Team Hearthlytics.

The most impressive repeat this month was that of muzzy, also of Team Hearthlytics, who finished in fifth place to follow up his third place in December.

There is some controversy over the HWS points table. Several players have suggested that they played in tournaments that they believed carried HWC points, that actually did not. This will need to be addressed going forward.

With that being said, it does seem as if the standings are being treated as final. Team Hearthlytics have claimed the two two places, and the rest of the top ten is also formidable. Beyond the players listed in the image below, Chakki, TidesofTime, Fibonacci, Amnesiac, and Dart have all made it into the top 25. StrifeCro and kitkatz are the main major names from the rest of the top 128. The players will gather at various locations to play in a LAN qualifier later this week.

The Winter preliminary tournaments in each region will decide the players who play in the Winter Championship in March. We will provide results and news all the way to Blizzcon.

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If you're not a fan of playing huge Legendary minions every turn, then you may need to rethink your approach to Hearthstone.

The Hearthstone team is on a roll with Tavern Brawls! After Top 2, one of the most well-received Tavern Brawls in recent memory, this week's Tavern Brawl is titled "Cloneball!".

Each player's deck is filled with four copies of random Legendary minions, including minions from the Wild format. Players will also receive a number of copies of "Offensive Play", a card which reduces the cost of your next Legendary minion by 3 Mana, as well as all other copies of that same Legendary in your hand:

Though it's difficult to game plan for a specific strategy as the Legendary minions you receive appear to be random, I thought it was pretty sweet to play Loatheb into Onyxia into Onyxia into Onyxia. Slamming huge Legendary minions onto the battlefield is one of the most fun things to do in all of Hearthstone, and you'll get to do it again and again in this week's brawl!
As is true with most brawls where the class cards aren't incredibly important, Warlock is strong by virtue of Life Tap. However, Paladin has some of the strongest Legendary minions in the history of the Hearthstone, so you could also try to high-roll a deck full of Tirion Fordrings and Wickerflame Burnbristles.

The targeted cards are Spiteful Summoner, Possessed Lackey, Call to Arms, Dark Pact, Crystal Core and Naga Sea Witch.
The community's prayers have been answered as nerfs for six problematic cards have been announced.
UPDATE - The nerfs went live earlier today. You can disenchant the affected cards and get full dust value until June 5, 2018.
Four of these cards are Spiteful Summoner, Possessed Lackey, Call to Arms and Naga Sea Witch. Even though there were a lot of interesting suggestions as to how these cards could be handled, Team 5 chose the simplest, yet elegant, way to weaken them: increase their mana cost. The first three cards will have their mana cost increased by 1, whereas Naga Sea Witch will jump to an extreme 8 mana!
Dark Pact will now restore 4 health to your hero, instead of 8. Lastly, Crystal Core will undergo a second nerf in its history: it will now produce 4/4 minions. Do you think it will survive even its second nerf like Unleash the Hounds or Sylvanas Windrunner did?
Some of the cards that we know the team was considering changing, but will remain unscathed for now are Sunkeeper Tarim, Doomguard, Bloodreaver Gul'dan and Baku Paladin Hero Power.
These changes will take effect after the end of the HCT playoffs at the end of May.
Daxxarri
In an update that will arrive some time after the HCT Playoffs are complete, we will be making balance changes to the following cards:
Naga Sea Witch – Will cost 8 mana. (Up from 5)
In update 9.1, we introduced a rule change to increase the consistency of Hearthstone game mechanics. The change affected precisely when Naga Sea Witch’s cost change was applied to cards. This allowed it to be combined with the cost reduction effects on giants, and as a result, it became fairly easy to reduce their mana cost to 0.

We think Hearthstone is better all around when interactions are consistent, and we like the fact that a Naga Sea Witch giants deck archetype exists. That said, we also understand that, with its current functionality, this deck can generate early board states that are unreasonable for most classes to deal with. By increasing the cost of Naga Sea Witch to 8 mana, the deck’s concept remains intact, but the combo is delayed until later in a match when more decks are likely to have the tools to handle the arrival of so many giants.

Spiteful Summoner – Will cost 7 mana. (Up from 6)
After set rotation arrived with the Year of the Raven, Spiteful Summoner became more powerful and consistent when used in decks containing 10 mana cost spells. This is because the pool of 10 mana cost minions in Standard is smaller, so players could more reliably count on getting a powerful minion from Spiteful Summoner’s effect. Even considering the deckbuilding sacrifices that an effective Spiteful Summoner deck requires, we think that increasing the card’s mana cost to 7 is more in line with the powerful outcomes that are possible when it’s used alongside cards like Ultimate Infestation.

Dark Pact – Will restore 4 Health. (Down from 8)
There are two aspects of Dark Pact that make it powerful. At a cost of 1 mana, it’s easily used alongside cards like Carnivorous Cube, Possessed Lackey, and Spiritsinger Umbra for big combo turns. It also gives Warlocks enough healing potential so that aggressively using Lifetap and playing cards like Kobold Librarian and Hellfire feel less consequential. We left Dark Pact’s cost intact so it can still be used as part of interesting combos, but lessened the healing it provides so Warlocks will need to more carefully consider how much damage they take over the course of a match.

Possessed Lackey – Will cost 6 mana. (Up from 5)
Some of the card combos involving Possessed Lackey present situations that are too difficult to deal with in the early-to-mid stages of the game. Increasing its mana cost to 6 delays some of those powerful card combos to turns that are easier for opposing decks to overcome.

Call to Arms – Will cost 5 mana. (Up from 4)
Currently, there are three popular Paladin decks: Even Paladin, Murloc Paladin, and Odd Paladin. Among the three decks, Even Paladin and Murloc Paladin have consistently been the most powerful two archetypes over the first few weeks since the release of The Witchwood. Call to Arms moving to 5 mana restricts it from being used in Even decks and reduces its power somewhat when used in Murloc and other Paladin decks.
We expect that players will experiment with Call to Arms at 5 mana in Odd Paladin decks, but we don’t expect this card to have much of an impact. This is because Odd Paladin can’t access 2 mana minions (meaning Call to Arms could only ever summon three 1 mana minions if played in that deck).

Note: As a result of this change, we are adjusting the “Greymane’s Alliance” deck recipe. It will now have two copies of Saronite Chain Gang in place of Call to Arms.
The Caverns Below – The quest reward, Crystal Core, will read: For the rest of the game, your minions are 4/4. (Down from 5/5)
The Quest Rogue deck uses a strategy that’s strong against slow, control-heavy and fatigue decks, but struggles against most other deck archetypes. There’s a fine line between being powerful against very slow decks and being powerful versus virtually all non-aggressive strategies. By changing the quest reward to make the resulting minions 4/4 instead of 5/5, Quest Rogue should still be a reasonable option versus slow, extreme late-game decks, but offer a less polarized matchup with more moderate control decks.

(source)
Are you happy with these changes? Do you think some cards will still be playable or are all six cards useless now? What's your opinion on the unchanged cards?

Get your games in with Cubelock and Even Paladin while you can! The upcoming balance patch will drop on the 22nd.

Confirmed today on the official Hearthstone blog, the upcoming balance patch will go live on May 22nd.
Though the nerfs had been announced several days ago, a timeline had previously not been provided for when the nerfs would go live. For those who have yet hear, the following cards will be receiving nerfs:
Naga Sea Witch will have its Mana cost increased from 5 to 8 Mana
Spiteful Summoner will have its Mana cost increased from 6 to 7 Mana
Dark Pact will restore 4 Health instead of 8 health
Possessed Lackey will have its Mana cost increased from 5 to 6 Mana
Call to Arms will have its Mana cost increased from 4 to 5 Mana
Crystal Core will turn minions into 4/4s instead of 5/5s

This week's episode features a fresh take on a popular deck, courtesy of Casie.
Can you guess the next move?
Situation #22: Let's Even the Odds
Picking up where we left off last week, we find ourselves in the middle of an odd/even matchup between Warlock and Shaman. I picked this situation partially because it was an interesting spot with many options available to us, and also because its a ladder situation I highly doubt any of my readers have encountered before:

Commenters quickly identified several key factors about this matchup, namely that Defile and Hellfire are off the table for our opponent and that the only "board clear" available for our opponent is Despicable Dreadlord. Our opponent is more likely to have single target removal (such as Voodoo Doll) or is looking to play a demon-related 5 drop next turn in Skull of the Man'ari, Possessed Lackey, or Doomguard.
Bozonik summed up this situation excellently in his comment from last week's thread:
There seemed to be a consensus among commenters that "Option 1", Hero Power + Sea Giant was the line here. It puts a big nasty minion on the board, applying pressure and forcing our opponent to have Voodoo Doll. In the heat of the moment I went with "Option 2", the full clear, but after looking back on things and reading over the comments I believe Hero Power + Giant was the correct line. Despicable Dreadlord is really the only card which gives us serious trouble next turn (since our opponent won't be able to play Possessed Lackey and kill it) and this line plays around Dreadlord while applying just as much pressure as the other options.
I was secretly hoping that the tap + Giant wasn't the correct line here (because its the most obvious one), but the obvious solution is often the correct one. If you're ever in a situation such as this where you have no idea what your opponent is up to, it's probably best to go for the "obvious" line and not get cute.
Situation #23: Broken Mirrors
Today's deck comes courtesy of Kevin "Casie" Eberlein, who cut the dragon package from Mind Blast Priest to turn the deck into something with much more of a combo/aggro feel to it. Many pros are pegging Mind Blast Priest to be the next "best deck in the meta" after the nerfs drop, and Casie's list has a serious advantage in the mirror match:
Though I didn't find nearly as much success with the deck as Casie did, it did provide me with plenty of interesting situations for What's the Move! Here's the one I ended up choosing for this week's episode:

It's turn 2, we're on The Coin, and our ladder opponent just played a Wild Pyromancer. For the purposes of this exercise, we can say that we're 100% confident our opponent is on Mind Blast Priest. However, this isn't a mirror match at all. We have Prophet Velen, Holy Smite, two copies of Holy Fire (most Mind Blast Priests run just one), and Lifedrinker in our deck, which gives us a huge advantage in late-game Anduin vs Anduin races. Knowing that we have an advantage in the late game should color our decision heavily on turn two, where have a surprising number of options available to us.
So, what's the move?